Created on Tue Sep 04, 2007 12:47 pm with 17 blog posts
For all kind of game info, text or whatever you call it. Oh! Blog was the name. Not only games of course... there will also be blogs about all kind of things. This is my first blog so I don't know how it will be like.

I have been collecting seeds from all kinds of grocery store peppers and today I decided it was time to sow them. There are going to be many more plants compared to last year.

I hope I'm not too late. I wanted to wait until there was more sunlight. I also have limited space indoors, so I'm planning to put them outside when it gets warmer, but I don't want them to get too big before that.

I have sown four seeds of each variety but I have not yet decided how many I'm going to keep.

Bell peppers
Just ordinary red, orange and yellow bell peppers. The red ones are from my two best plants last year.

Hungarian peppers
Most peppers sold around here are either from the Netherlands or from Spain, but one day my dad came home with some peppers marked Hungary. I would like to call them bell peppers but the walls are tougher than I'm used to so I guess they are best for cooking. The thing that excites me most about these peppers is the colour. I have never seen a white pepper before (when looking closely it's actually very pale yellow). I have also sown red ones.

"Mini" peppers
From a bag containing a mix of small red, orange and yellow sweet peppers. I think the smaller size might make them suitable for the growing conditions I give my plants (i.e. relatively small containers and short season).

Hot peppers
This year I'm also going to grow hot peppers. I was a bit impatient so I have actually already started a few month ago with some regular red chillies (see picture below). In an Asian food store I found some kind of Asian chilli (from Malaysia) which were full of seeds. I've also bought a red habanero but I was too afraid to use it for anything because I have heard it's very hot (the woman I bought it from even warned me). It ended up getting bad, so I haven't tasted it, but I've saved the seeds and am looking forward to growing the plant.

I had some spare room on my window sill so I decided to grow some pepper plants. I collected seeds from a couple of store-bought sweet peppers. Most of the seeds were taken from a big yellow bell pepper. I also took some seeds from a smaller variety. I wouldn't say it was bell-shaped but it was sweet and had thin walls. I think the the colour was orange.

After letting the seeds dry for a couple of weeks I put some dirt in a small container, spread the seeds on top and added water. This resulted in many more plants than I could possibly take care of so when they had got their first pair of true leaves I selected 5 plants and removed the rest. Two plants were selected because they were clearly bigger than the rest. I also wanted to make sure I got plants from both varieties but since all seeds had been mixed it wasn't easy to tell the different, but i tried to pick from different corners of the container and what I thought looked slightly different.

After a few weeks it was time to separate them into their own, bigger, containers that they are still in today.

All five pepper plants.

All plants have flowered and produced green pods but none has ripened yet. The plants has been growing very slow lately and seem to be focusing most energy on the existing pods.

I have grown a pepper plant before but that was more than 15 years ago. At that time I didn't even like the taste of peppers but it was fun growing anyway. I don't think it ever ripened. This year I started earlier so I hope to get at least one ripe pod per plant.

Pot A
This has always been the biggest-looking plant. The leaves are wider and more wrinkly compared to the other plants. It has got the biggest pod of all plants. The total number of pods is three (not counting a few undeveloped ones at the top that will probably fall off soon).

The plant growing in pot A.

Pot B
This plant is about the same size as plant A. The width of the biggest pod is similar to the biggest pod on plant A but it's not as long. The total number of pods is four. Usually there is only one flower for each location where the stem split into two new branches, but as you can see this one has two pods growing from the same spot.

The plant growing in pot B.

Pot C
This plant has always been a bit different. It's shorter, has more visible side shoots on the main stem (still pretty small though) and the pods are more elongated, not at all bell-shaped. I suspect this plant is an offspring of the smaller variety that I took seeds from. The window in my room is facing north, noth-east, so it doesn't get much direct sunlight. I have heard pepper plants love the sun so I have experimented with this plant by putting it in a sunny south-facing window. Some of the leaves look a bit sunburned because of this. It was quite warm during that period so I think it got too hot and the pods just fell off. When I put it back into my room the pods started to develop, and it now have three of them growing.

The short plant growing in pot C.

Pot D
I thought three plants was enough but instead of throwing the other two away I just let them grow in the same container. These were the smallest of the five but after giving them some fertilizer they have grown a lot and is now almost as tall as plant A and B. Their stems are still much thinner though so I'm not sure how they will be able to support the pods. They are a bit behind the other plants and is still putting out many flowers. They look more similar to A and B than to C so I think they are offsprings of the yellow bell pepper.

This is what I have been working on lately. The game has been around since late 2010, but in the latest version that I released just a few days ago I added a lot of new stuff. Most significant changes are probably the new Time Trial mode and the possibility to play with other people over the Internet.

The game can be played using keyboard, mouse and other game controllers. It is also possible to play against the computer even though it's less fun. One thing that is special about this game is that the tracks are generated automatically.

The game works on both Linux and Windows so why not try it out? If you have nothing better to do than reading Frihost blog posts you could just as well be playing this game with me for a while

Yesterday I had a problem with my computer. I noticed that some games that used OpenGL was very slow and some programs didn't work at all. I had to restart the computer to make it work again. When I left my computer for some time and came back later it was all black and I couldn't do anything but pressing the power button (The screensavers use OpenGL).

Then it got worse. During bootup the graphics was messed up, with vertical lines and characters that was not correct, but it was still easy to see what was going on. After the Ubuntu loading screen it all went black and I couldn't do anything. This made me worried.

I have had problems with the graphics card before. The problem that time was that there were too much dust in the fan, but the symptoms was not as serious as they were this time.

Today I cleaned the inside of my computer and now it appears to work again. I guess I should clean the graphics card fan more often. I don't do it very often because I'm lazy and I have to disconnect it to clean it properly.